了解中国系列：Chinese Merchants Can’t Discount Teams of Shopper（转贴）
The Wall Street Journal
February 28, 2006
Chinese Merchants Can’t Discount Teams of Shoppers Seeking Bargains
By JAMES T. AREDDY
February 28, 2006
SUZHOU, China — Seller beware: Some of China’s 1.3 billion consumers are
angling for group discounts.
Chinese shoppers have long been known as hard-nosed bargainers. Now, to
the dismay of merchants, some have started shopping in teams to haggle for
bigger markdowns.
The practice, called tuangou, or team purchase, begins in Internet chat
rooms, where like-minded consumers hatch plans to buy appliances,
furnishings, food, even cars, in bulk. Next, they show up en masse at
stores like Suzhou Zhongyi Kitchen Co. to demand discounts.
On a recent Saturday, Zhang Qinyong, who owns the kitchen-cabinetry shop
in this city near Shanghai, found himself cornered against his display
cabinets by a team of more than a dozen shoppers.
"In Suzhou, no other products are better than ours, I bet," he told the
crowd. He insisted that craftsmanship and German materials made his
cabinets worth more.
"Forget quality. Let’s talk about price," snapped one member of the buying
group, 36-year-old Guo Yong, an electrical engineer. For the next hour,
the shoppers turned aside Mr. Zhang’s sales pitches with an unbending
response: "Thirty-five percent off!"
Successful haggling is a point of pride in China, where even shoppers in
department stores treat price tags as mere starting points. The practice
is gaining popularity at a time of unprecedented change in China’s retail
sector.
Name-brand consumer goods now fill the nation’s stores, giving Chinese
consumers more choice than ever before. In an increasingly competitive
marketplace, merchants are quietly bending to consumer demands.
Group purchasing is catching on in booming cities such as Shanghai. On the
Web site 51tuangou.com1 — in Chinese, the name sounds like "I want to
team buy" — consumer teams formulate plans to bargain for products
ranging from Buick automobiles to Panasonic televisions and refrigerators.
Dozens of other Chinese Web sites offer similar services. EBay Inc.’s
Chinese site offers potential bulk sellers of goods an option to solicit
team bids.
Zhang Guohua, the 34-year-old founder of 51tuangou.com, says he decided to
launch his Web site after saving money two years ago on bathroom fixtures
for his new apartment. He arranged those purchases, he says, by posting
messages in general-interest Internet chat rooms, listing the brands he
planned to buy. "Let’s meet at the shop," he wrote. Many did. "I was
really shocked by the power of ganging up," Mr. Zhang says.
Last year, he says, 380,000 consumers registered to use his Web site, free
of charge, to organize group purchases. He says he makes money from ads
and commissions from companies that offer discounts on the site.
In the U.S. and Europe, several Web-based businesses were set up in the
late 1990s to arrange discounts on group purchases of consumer goods. But
customers were turned off by the amount of time it took to complete
transactions and other complications, and many of the Internet businesses
failed.
China’s version of team buying, however, leads to face-to-face
negotiations. "That’s a little scary, the mob mentality," says Tom Van
Horn, former chief executive officer of Mercata Inc., whose now-defunct
Web site attempted to negotiate bulk discounts for U.S. consumers.
In Shanghai, when Cai Kun decided in December to buy a new General Motors
Corp. subcompact, the Chevrolet Aveo, he logged onto a Web site where
others were chatting about staging a team purchase. On a Saturday morning,
28-year-old Mr. Cai and 17 others met for the first time at Anji Mingmen
Car Services Co., a Chevy showroom in downtown Shanghai. As planned, they
told the dealership’s manager they would buy 18 Aveos in one pop — but
only if he would cut roughly 10% off sticker prices as high as $12,862.
Negotiations went on for six hours. Group members broke away occasionally
for private meetings. The dealer tried unsuccessfully to negotiate
separately with buyers who wanted the more expensive SX model and those
who didn’t. In the end, the group extracted a discount of nearly 9% on a
fleet of 18 Aveo cars, along with gifts such as car-wash vouchers, says
one buyer. Group members such as Mr. Cai who bought the fancier Aveo SX
AT, for instance, agreed to pay $11,712, about 8.9% below the sticker
price. Individual buyers can normally expect a discount of up to 6%,
Shanghai Chevrolet dealers say.
Yang Feng, sales manager of the dealership that provided the discount,
declines to talk about individual deals. "Team purchases aren’t common,"
he says. "But if more than 10 buyers come together, we can give them a
cheaper price than we do individuals."
Some manufacturers don’t like the practice. Some Chinese dealers of sinks
and toilets made by Kohler Co., for example, have offered group discounts
via Mr. Zhang’s Web Site. The company, based in Kohler, Wisconsin, said:
"Kohler does not support team purchases via the Internet as it purely
supports competition based on price."
Chinese dealers of BMW AG’s luxury cars typically provide 2% discounts for
four-car orders, says Jiao Jian, fleet sales manager at Shanghai Bowdex
Motor Co., a BMW importer. But such discounts are intended primarily for
companies ordering more than one car, not strangers who meet on the Web.
In an internal memo this year, the dealership urged employees not to
capitulate to buying groups set up for the sole purpose of getting a
discount, says Mr. Jiao.
Cosmetics group Est Lauder Cos. and Cartier, the jeweler owned by
France’s Cie. Financiere Richemont SA, say they stop team-buying at the
door with fixed-price policies.
The team buyers who targeted Mr. Zhang’s cabinet shop, most of them new
homeowners in their 20s and 30s, met on an Internet bulletin board, where
earlier postings revealed that another team last year had squeezed a 35%
discount from Mr. Zhang. For two weeks, they plotted strategy, and team
members visited his shop individually to view the cabinets. "If we have
more people, we can of course get more discount," said one of their
Internet postings.
Nearby cabinet shops were nearly vacant when more than a dozen team
members filed into Mr. Zhang’s store one Saturday afternoon this month and
began haggling for a 35% discount. More than an hour later, Mr. Zhang
appeared to be wearing down. He directed an assistant to type up and
distribute an offer: 30% off cabinets, 15% off hinges and free gifts to
the team.
Three hours after the group arrived, some team members continued to press
for a bigger discount. But 10 had put down deposits on the package offer,
including Mr. Guo and his wife, who agreed to pay $875 for new cabinets.
They chose Mr. Zhang’s shop, they say, only because they saw the team
forming on the Internet. "Last year, I bought wooden flooring this way,"
says Mr. Guo. "I don’t have too much money."
–Tang Hanting in Shanghai contributed to this article.
Write to James T. Areddy at [email protected]
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